Underkeeper

Bernt stared at Jori in incomprehension. Well… that was new.

“Uh… you can talk?” he said lamely.

Jori cocked her head, grinning down at him.

“I talk! Burn bad lizards!”

Bernt didn’t know what to make of that. He knew that demons were supposed to gain power from souls; that was the first thing anyone learned about them. But she wasn’t consuming souls—at least not properly. Souls were released on death. For a demon to get a hold of one, it normally had to be captured in a soulstone by a warlock, who would then use them as a sort of currency to satisfy their end of the most common types of demonic pacts.

What Jori was getting out of those kobold corpses was, at best, a soul fragment, or some sort of residue that was left behind. It shouldn’t affect her so much in such a short amount of time. At least, he didn’t think so.

What would happen if she kept growing? Most demons were restricted in what they could do on the mortal plane—that was one of the functions of a demonic pact. Jori, as far as Bernt knew, wasn’t. He had no idea who might have originally summoned her, and he certainly hadn’t formed a pact with her. His familiar bond wasn’t restrictive so much as it was a way to communicate. Beyond that, all it did was minimize any aggression the familiar might feel toward the bonded mage, but that was less a compulsion than a suggestion.

It hadn’t seemed important at the time because back then, Jori had absolutely no extraordinary powers. She wasn’t dangerous. Now… well, she’d just killed two kobolds in seconds.

All these thoughts flashed through Bernt’s head in a moment, but he put them aside for now. He didn’t have time to worry about what Jori was becoming—they were in danger. He was still sitting down, trying to decide whether he could put weight on his injured knee. It was sore and swollen, and when he prodded at it, it felt like he was stabbing a knife into the joint.

For a moment, he considered telling Jori to back off. That they needed to hide and reach the surface as quickly as possible.

But…he couldn’t exactly run with his injury, and the healing potion he’d taken from Therion was in his bag. The bag that was currently in the hands of the same kobolds that should be coming back down the tunnel in a minute or so. He could already hear them talking to each other in the distance, their voices echoing off the tunnel walls.

That was fine. Bernt was tired of running. He was an adventurer, dammit—the kobolds should fear him, not the other way around. He didn’t want to back off.

These little assholes had somehow managed to ambush and capture gods only knew how many adventurers within the past day, including his own party. They’d caught him, taken his equipment and beaten him bloody. But they weren’t that tough. They just relied on surprise and numbers to overwhelm them, and those insidious traps to slow them down.

Bernt didn’t have either of his wands, but he did have his ring to use as a focus.

He looked around. What could he do? Nothing but bare stone walls and some cleaning supplies in one of the corners—a few buckets, rags and a mop sized for a kobold.

Seeing that, Bernt tried to picture what a kobold janitor might look like, cleaning. No, it was too absurd. He couldn’t do it.

But he was getting sidetracked. He had an idea.

“Jori, can you try to slow them down? It doesn’t need to be much, but another minute would help a lot.”

Hissing in the affirmative, Jori disappeared back out the door. He wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but he had his own preparations to make.

Ever since he’d come down to this dungeon, he’d been thinking of himself as just a pyromancer—trying to make fire spells work underground. That wasn’t necessarily wrong, especially when his best tool, his pyromancer’s wand, gave him an edge in that area. But fire wasn’t the best solution to every problem. He was an academy-trained mage, not some jumped-up sorcerer with a single trick.

Crawling over to the cleaning equipment, Bernt grabbed the mop and used it to support himself as he pushed himself up to a standing position. Then he hobbled back toward the doorway, looking up at the tunnel ceiling.

Bernt wasn’t good at earth magic, and he’d never learned many proper geomancy spells, but he practiced his cantrips nearly every single day. This was something he could manage.

Using his ring as a focus, he began remolding the stone ceiling. First he formed cracks near the tunnel walls for a length of about ten steps. That took only twenty seconds, but he could already hear the kobolds approaching. There was a cry, then screams. He sensed Jori fighting, but he did his best to ignore any information coming through the bond. He couldn’t afford distractions right now. He had to trust her to slow them long enough.

Trying not to overdo it, he began hollowing out a shallow cavity above the tunnel ceiling to weaken it. Another fifteen seconds later, he was maybe halfway done when he felt the ceiling start to give. There was a quiet but ominous crack as a small section near Bernt sagged down without quite falling, and he immediately stopped.

He’d begun shoring it up when Jori came racing down the tunnel, clinging to the ceiling as she liked to do. Her back was on fire, trailing flames. The kobolds were a few seconds behind her—he was out of time. He had to hope he could help Jori after the fight.

“Down!” he hissed urgently, hoping that she would get his meaning through their bond.

Just as she reached the cracked section of the ceiling, she let go and dropped to the ground, running right past Bernt and into the room. As she did, he cast a fire shield to fill the tunnel in front of him and tried to take a step back, but nearly tripped over himself.

He’d have to let them get close. Far, far closer than he wanted to.

The first kobold was already a step into the trap when it noticed the dust and gravel littered all over the ground. It slowed, looked up, and squawked in surprise.

Icy fear gripped Bernt’s stomach, but there was nothing to worry about. The four kobolds behind the leader pushed forward, heedless of the danger. One had a severe burn on its side, and another had a steel bolt from one of their own traps jutting out of its shoulder… Jori must have really pissed them off.

Focusing on the ceiling again, Bernt cast his earth shaping cantrip again and widened the cracks he’d made earlier. As he did, the first kobold was forced into his fire shield by its fellows. Its flesh made a searing hiss, like meat hitting a hot pan.

The kobold screeched in pain, barreling into Bernt along with a choking cloud of dust. Claws raked at him, but they barely broke the skin across his arms and chest. It wasn’t a real attack so much as panicked flailing. That wasn’t to say it didn’t hurt. Bernt pushed himself back with his good leg and lashed out with the mop handle like a club. It clipped the kobold across the skull, and the creature fell back for a moment, stunned.

A seemingly eternal moment later, Bernt put a fire dart into its chest. The spell took noticeably longer to cast than it did with his wand, and it was weaker—but fire was still his specialty, and the kobold had been at point-blank range. The bolt of conjured flame melted straight through into its heart. The kobold collapsed, twitching in agony as it died.

Bernt wheezed, trying to cough the swirling dust out of his lungs. He pulled himself back to his feet and went back to the doorway, which was now partially clogged with debris. Painfully, he hobbled over it. He needed to check on Jori. She hadn’t come back out, and he sensed her pain through the bond. She’d been injured.

She was sitting up against the wall, just inside the room. Surprisingly, her discomfort was diminishing by the second.

“Jori! Are you alright?” Bernt asked. “What happened?”

She looked up at him, then turned, gesturing at her back.

Three parallel scars were visible there, though they were fading even as he watched. One of the kobolds must have managed a good swipe at her, but she was healing remarkably fast. He wasn’t sure if her rapid healing was new—as far as he knew, she’d never been hurt before. Though, now that he thought about it, she’d been scuffling with massive sewer rats and who knew what else down in the sewers for years. He’d never seen her with so much as a scratch.

“Not bad. You don’t worry,” she said, apparently trying to reassure him. It was kind of cute, he thought. “I eat bad lizards!” She grinned at him, displaying decidedly not-so-cute razor teeth. Making good on that declaration, she bounded up and out into the hallway. The dust was only now starting to settle.

Bernt followed much more slowly, just in time to witness her consume several soul fragments, three of which rose from the pile of rubble that now filled the tunnel nearly to hip height. That still made him a little uncomfortable, but this really wasn’t the time to work out what was going on with her. At least she didn’t physically try to eat the dead. He had more urgent issues to deal with, and any power she could gain in the meantime was a benefit.

“Jori, stay back for a moment, alright?” He raised his hands again. “I’m going to move the rubble.”

He needed to dig out the dead kobolds to find the one with his bag. He needed that healing potion, at the very least, and his backup wand. Hopefully, one of them had been carrying his pyromancer’s wand as well. But he was in no shape to move rocks with his bare hands. He wasn’t about to tire himself out doing it that way, and he wouldn’t have even if he hadn’t been lamed. A quick earth shaping cantrip later, the first of the corpses rose out of the rubble, pushed up as he forced other stones to meld underneath it. It was wearing a tail ring made of gold and silver, with a few precious stones set into it.

Finally some loot. Bernt achingly dragged himself up to the body, pulled the ring off, and stuffed it into a pocket. The second corpse didn’t have anything of value, but the third had Bernt’s bag slung over its shoulders. He breathed a sigh of relief as he stripped it off, going through it to find the potion.

It was all there.

He pulled the potion out, and moved to break the seal on it when he heard a rustle right behind him. He turned his head to look as a clawed hand gripped his shoulder, and a knife plunged toward his neck. For a moment, Bernt felt like time stood still. He tried to pull back, but there wasn’t time to do anything. He would die here, right now, and there wasn’t time to do anything.

Hot blood sprayed over Bernt’s face as the kobold was violently jerked backwards, throat torn wide open.

Bernt stared down at the dying creature, dumbfounded. It was the second one he’d raised out of the pile. It hadn’t been dead.

Jori hissed at it, slashing its face again in rage until it stopped twitching. It took longer than he would have expected, and he averted his gaze. The scene was… kind of messed up. Like watching a cat play with a dead mouse—except the mouse was quite a bit bigger than the cat in this case.

Then, just as quickly, she was calm again, sitting down on the rubble as if nothing had happened and watching him with faintly glowing eyes.

“Bad lizard. Sneaky,” she hissed. Then she poked the body with her foot demonstratively and grinned. “Not so sneaky now.”

He didn’t know what to say. She’d saved his life. Her personality hadn’t changed—he didn’t think she was going to turn on him or anything. But… she was a lot more dangerous than she’d been just a few days earlier.

“Jori. I’m glad that we’re friends.”

Breaking the seal on Therion’s potion, he drank it down. He tried not to think about what a waste it was. A potion like this could heal almost anything, and he was wasting it on a relatively minor knee injury. But he didn’t have a lower-grade potion, and he’d get himself killed if he tried to hobble through a dungeon on one leg just to save some money.

Experimentally, he straightened his leg, which obeyed with an odd popping noise. It hurt for a second, then felt completely fine. Bernt sighed in relief.

“Alright, Jori, keep an eye out for anyone coming down the tunnel, please.”

He needed to find his wand, and then he needed a break.